Auction Action

When we lived in Colorado, we didn't have cable tv, and were at the mercy of whatever the airwaves brought us (which was sometimes pretty interesting, in a weird way, like the news from Cheyenne). But we could get two different PBS stations from Denver, which was a first for me. One way the two stations distinguished themselves from each other was by trying to have different on-air fund-raising strategies. One station played all the Doo-Wop and Suze Orman you could ever want, and the other did even weirder things. The weirdest was probably their auctions.

Sometimes, it would be the traditional "silent auction" with different boards and where bidders would call in and talk to phone bank people and all that. But sometimes they would have real live auctions, too, with a real auctioneer doing the whole traditional sing-song thing (bidders also phoned in, but the selling was real-time). Usually they were auctioning off sports collectibles or furniture at these auctions and just about every time they were on I watched some of it.

I think it drove Rose a little crazy, of course, but as I told her, the sound of a real auctioneer has a kind of soothing effect on me. It's a sound I recall from my childhood, and I think I fell asleep many, many times as a child, listening to the song of the auctioneer. (My folks, for those who don't know it already, long had a second income from being antique dealers and I remember going to innumerable auctions, from truly rustic farm auctions up to more classy affairs).

Anyway, a couple of times over the last
year or so, I've met up with my folks in central Ohio at a particular auction house where they have become regular buyers and (to their surprise) occasional employees. I've bought few small items here and there, and sold a couple of them on (for a profit, I might add) on eBay, but I've also come to see auctions like this one a little differently.

At this auction, for example, there are usually two (and sometimes more) auction rings operating simultaneously: at the right, you see what's left on one auction ring at the end of the day, working it's way towards me down this table of glass and china. Not many bidders: good for buyers, I guess, but not so good for the seller. The empty chairs face the main ring, shown at about the same time in the top photo.

Most real life auctions are like this one, of course, where an estate is being cleared out. And it's fun, still, to go and try to find a bargain, and I suppose it's good to support the local economy. And I still enjoy listening to the auctioneer patter and the jokes. But there's a sad side to auctions, too, I think. One of the things you really realize at an auction is that collections have a life cycle, too, one that is almost always closely tied to the lives of their owners. I'm not sure if that makes me more or less eager to gather my own collections, though I know I'd hate to see them auctioned off.

But maybe there's a way to see that buying something at an auction is not only a kind of recycling, but it's what any collector should want: for the things one collector loved to be bought and loved by another. So, while I hope to go to more auctions, and to find a few things I can sell on--I hope to buy some things that I can keep and love, too.

The fast and the furious

I gave up making big New Year's resolutions years ago.  You know, the traditional "lose 20 pounds, learn to say no, procrastinate less, be a faultless human being" kinds of goals.

Instead, if I make any resolutions at all (which I usually don't), they're very small.  It started several years back when I jokingly resolved that in the coming year, I would throw out any pen that didn't work.  Inevitably, shortly into January of that year I pulled a pen out of a drawer and found it inkless.  Remembering my resolution, I threw it away without guilt.  (That last part is important:  previously, I would've felt bad about throwing it out:  maybe it would work next time.  Wasn't I doing less harm to the environment by holding on to it, rather than delegating it to the landfill?)

I kept that resolution, and still throw out nonworking pens.  Consequently, I almost never grab one that doesn't work.  It's ridiculous, but that small choice genuinely reduced some of my daily frustration--and that's priceless.

So, I've been trying to think about what kind of micro-resolution I could make this year that might have a similar effect.  Nothing really came to mind until I was walking to campus a few days ago.  It was the first day of the semester, it was 8 a.m., it was snowing and gray and cold...in short, I was in a foul mood. 

As I approached the intersection (ironically) of Pleasant Street and High Street, the light turned green and I stepped into the crosswalk only to nearly be run down by a college-aged driver who glared at me as she turned in front of me. 

This did not improve my mood.

I used to think that Greeley was the worst town for pedestrians that I'd ever lived in, but Morgantown quickly overtook the top spot.  My walk to school takes me straight up the main drag through downtown to campus, and every day it's kind of a dodgem car situation, especially at certain intersections--around the post office, in particular, but there are lots of other places where, if a pedestrian and a car are approaching at the same time, the car will cut off the pedestrian every time.

Problem is, I take this all personally.  When, of course, it's got nothing to do with me.  And if I'm honest, when I'm the driver, I get impatient with pedestrians, too.

I'm reminded of a great installment of the comic strip Potshots that ran in the Ohio State student newspaper, The Lantern, when I was an undergrad.  It was a two-panel gag.  The first panel bore the title "OSU student as pedestrian," and showed a student crossing the street, shaking his fist at a passing car and yelling, "Watch where you're going, buddy--can't you see people are trying to walk here?!"  The second had the header "Same OSU student, 15 minutes later," and showed the same guy behind the wheel of a car, shaking his first at a pedestrian and yelling "Get out of the street, you moron!"

Bottom line:  we're all a bunch of selfish, impatient @$$holes.

At any rate, I grumbled about the Pleasant Street incident all the way to campus, where--at the final intersection before my building--a very kind driver stopped and waved me across the street in front of him.  Sometimes I'll wave or mouth "thanks" when people do that, but a lot of times, I don't because I figure it's THE LAW, not a courtesy that merits recognition.  But then I thought, when most people are discourteous, shouldn't I acknowledge those who aren't?

So, that's my micro-resolution for 2010:  to try on my daily walk to work to ignore the crappy drivers as much as possible, and to notice and thank the thoughtful ones.  Somehow, I know that if I can do that consistently, it's likely to reduce my daily frustration level even more than tossing dead pens.

Another MLA Story

I think the very first blog I posted here was my story about "Shoe-Love" from the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual conference in Chicago a couple of years ago. This year, when I went to the MLA, I wasn't expecting to have any blog-worthy experiences, but that just goes to show what I know.

Anyway, the MLA is a typical (even stereotypical) literature conference, but one where I kind of like to go, because there's always a good crowd of Anglo-Saxonist regulars. I went, gave my paper, ran into a few folks from WVU, and ran into more folks who knew WVU folks, so it was also a reminder that the academic world is a small one. Had a long discussion about the importance and significance of books in Anglo-Saxon studies with an old friend: neither of us seemed too worried that we hadn't actually read the books we were debating about. Somehow, I'm not too happy about that, in retrospect.

Ran into an old graduate school friend, Stacy, who's always fun to see, and we set up a plan to go out to dinner after my paper (which was at a 7:15 session). Gave my paper (about a new interpretation of three runes, believe it or not), and got some positive responses to it. Anyway, after things wound down, Stacy and I and the chair of the panel ended up looking for a place to get a moderately priced late dinner, and we asked the concierge at the conference hotel to help us out.

After a few moments of mystic consultation with his computer, he told us he could just fit us in at a table for three at a seafood/Italian restaurant a few blocks away at 9:30 (25 minutes later). He printed out an online menu for us, he gave us some walking directions, and we left the hotel feeling lucky he had found us a place--since with thousands of academics milling around, many restaurants were filled up. But when we got to the restaurant, it was practically empty, and Stacy and Shari both expressed some uncertainty. But I said, "Hey, it's Monday evening, between Christmas and New Years--no big deal if it's not full. Let's try it."

So we went in, and the waiter asked if we were "three for dinner" and we said yeah, and he didn't seem to care if we had a reservation or not; we all thought the concierge had been kind of a jerk for implying that our table for three was like the last table available in the place. So anyway, we sat there, ordered some drinks, and the waiter ran through a whole list of specials, etc.

And while he was talking, I saw something moving around on the floor out of the corner of my eye. I looked closer, and sure enough it was a little grey mouse, scurrying around here and there. As soon as the waiter stepped away, I mentioned it to the other two (whose backs were turned to the mouse area) and we all decided it was time to leave: empty restaurant, mouse running around--two strikes was all we needed.

So we left and went to the Irish Pub, where there was a small crowd, the food was fine, and--at the end of the evening--the owner's cat wandered by our table: no mice in there, I think.

We debated going back to the hotel to give the concierge a piece of our minds, but ultimately decided against it.

Peace on earth, goodwill to all, blah blah blah

It's no secret that the last few months have been something of a train wreck here at Camp Romantoes. So it felt like a real blessing that today--a day when the tearing of metal and the grinding of gears seems finally to have quieted--dawned bright and clear and sunny.

I put on the Yaktrax I got and never had a chance to use last winter and made my usual trek over to White Park. In the two years I've been walking there, I've marked out a pretty standard route that I follow more or less every time. It allows me to be in the woods, and away from street sounds and distant houses, as long as possible. What I've grown to love about trodding the same path every time is the remarkable balance of consistency and change it provides: same path, same general scenery, and yet radically different sights every time, depending on the season and the weather and the time of day.

In the fall, it's awash with color from the maples and oaks and buckeyes in the woods; in the spring, I love to watch the gradual creeping in of green.

And in the winter, even the bleakness is somehow lovely. Especially when everything is blanketed by snow and the light and shadow are magnified by sun and blue skies. Today as I walked I thought about how it doesn't seem that long ago that I was hiking through here to see the fall color...and how, before too long, small signs of life will start to emerge. Goddamn circle of life.

Robert Frost said it best: "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." Relentlessly, mercilessly sometimes. If you're lucky, patiently and gently. In the woods, thankfully, it feels more like the latter.

So, since we're supposed to be thinking about peace and all that good s**t at this time of year, I'll leave you with a little video of the waterfall in White Park. I hope you find it even a little bit as restorative online as I did in person this morning. A peaceful season to all, indeed--and our very sincere wishes for a happy new year.

Digging out

We didn't get hammered here as badly as folks further south and east did, but we still had a good eight inches of snow between Friday night and Saturday. Since Tom and I were both buried under final papers and exams, we didn't even leave the house until today.

You might recall that Tom has a penchant for odd snow-removal devices. Well, today he decided that a snow shovel was the best thing to use to clear the snow off the car. And he was right. We also took a push broom to it after the first pass with the shovel, and managed to clear it most of the way off.



This is definitely the heaviest snow we've had in the two-plus years we've lived in Morgantown; too bad we've been so busy that we haven't had a chance to get out our snowshoes and hike over to White Park. Somehow, I have a feeling we'll have other chances this winter.

Swinging Taps

I quote a lot of British poetry when I'm teaching the Brit Lit survey, and perhaps no lines get quoted more often than these lines from the beginning of Shakespeare's Sonnet 55: "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments/ Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

The irony, of course, is that the fragile paper on which the poem is written seems to have little chance of outlasting the marble and gold of a princely tomb. Blogs would seem to have even less enduring power.

Still, the blog seems the place, in some ways to tell a story or two about Dave Hathaway, who seemed to love to tell stories in his own way. So I'll tell a story about him and a story of his.

First, the story about him: I'll never forget when Rosemary and I first got engaged, Rose's folks were, I think, really delighted (so was I). They had always been very welcoming to me, and always made me feel like part of the family. But after we told them we'd gotten engaged, Dave made an effort to tell Rose and I how pleased he was, and finding us together that evening he said to us, "You two deserve each other." I knew what he meant, but I've always loved the memory, because that phrase seems so often to be used for exactly the opposite effect--it's something you say to people who are (as the Wife of Bath would phrase it) one another's purgatory here on earth.

For his story, I'll tell one I only heard him tell once, although I always meant to get him to tell it again. It was one of his stories from the war, which Rose says he never used to tell when he was younger. But anyway, though he was ultimately a radio operator during the war, before his unit got to Italy, he didn't have much radio work to do, and (in the army way) he either found something to do or was given something to do. Anyway, somehow he wrangled his musical background into being assigned as a bugler.

In northern Africa, apparently, being somehow dissatisfied with the bugle as he found it, he took a blowtorch to it, apparently thinking he could maybe reshape it somehow: of course, the solder joints just melted away, and he was left with a handful of unconnected pieces. When he took it to the quartermaster, he didn't have any real explanation for what happened, and he was understandably disappointed when the brass bugle was replaced by a plastic one. The sound quality was, apparently, not very good.

Still, on the night before the unit was supposed to head off to Italy, the captain, I guess, was away on business of some sort and Dave, when it came time to play taps, couldn't resist the temptation to "swing" it, and he did, and he never got in trouble for doing it, either.

But the story doesn't end there. Some forty years later, when he went to his first battalion reunion, he told the story of swinging taps, and another old soldier came up to him afterwards with a tear in his eye. He told Dave that he remembered hearing taps that night, and hearing it swing, and it made him feel a whole lot better about getting on the boat and going to Italy the next day.

If you ever doubted that music--or breaking the rules--could sometimes do real good, I can't think of a better example.

The last time I saw Dave Hathaway, he was listening to jazz, and I think it made him feel better, too.

Some black humor on the day

About fourteen years ago, after my parents' old cat Gretel died, my mom adopted a little calico kitten that she named Daisy. My dad grumbled about it, saying, "That cat's going to outlive me."

As the years went on, the two of them became fast friends--no small feat, given that Daisy was a bit of a psycho, and wouldn't really let anyone pet her.

Daisy developed renal failure early this week, and had to be put to sleep yesterday morning. Dad passed away early this morning. I think he'd be amused to know that his prognostication turned out to be wrong. In the end, it was a photo finish.

Dear T. F.

Here we are enduring a somewhat stressful holiday week at Rose's old homestead. I won't go into all the details now, partly because it's not really my story to tell. But as I told my own folks during this past week: when we moved to Morgantown, it was difficult, challenging, and stressful--because change is all of those things. But now we're being reminded that change that isn't planned and isn't voluntary can be even more difficult, challenging, and stressful.

But of course there's some good with the bad, in all sorts of ways, and we try to take the comfort from that that we can. There's been a lot of family togetherness, and many family reminiscences have been bouncing around in the air, and I thought I'd post one I found especially sweet, Rose's note to the tooth fairy (oh-so-familiarly addressed as "T. F."), from a time maybe only a few years before her dad's first round of cancer. Although it's hard to keep in mind, it's also hard not to be thankful that he's had what seems like a thirty-five year reprieve, including a happily busy retirement of around twenty years.

But let's focus, rather, on Rose's note, which I find thoroughly amusing, sweet, and charming, although I know that she thinks it makes her sound pushy and demanding ("PLEASE GIVE ME 25c!"). But to me it reads like a perfect little poem:

I lost my tooth while brushing it;
It went right down the drain.
And when I thought about it,
It gave me such a pain.
Please give me 25c.

In an old diary that Rosemary has from about the same period, she has an entry that reads something like this, "I had a bad day; I spilled a lot of things." And even now, spilling things is still a sign of a bad day for Rosemary, and I marvel to recall how much she must share with the little girl who wrote these things. And I also try to help her keep from spilling things as much as I can, although I'm not always successful. Who could be? And anyway, sometimes things spill all on their own, despite anything we can do.

And while I've never really fancied myself a poet, and it may just be the stress of recent events, I can't help but thinking, somehow, that many poems might be usefully ended with the simple honesty and directness of Rose's note to the tooth fairy: "Please give me 25c." Offhand, at least, I can't think of a single poem that it might not improve. I don't know if the tooth fairy came through with the quarter or not, but Rose's parents have kept the note for almost forty years: and this week, that seems like an otherworldly gift of far greater value.

The Greatest Generation

This is one of my favorite photos of my dad. Taken on V-E Day, in his barracks, he looks impossibly young. He was twenty, and I'm sure he fancied himself a man of the world. When he left his county-seat hometown of Grantsville, West Virginia, he hadn't seen much of the world, though he'd listened to it on the radio in the old henhouse that he'd wired up to live in during high school.

After two years of combat in northern Italy, he'd become fluent in Italian, having befriended a local family with whom he still exchanges Christmas cards. After V-E Day, he and some of his army buddies who also had leave traveled to Rome to see the sites, inadvertently alarming his mother back home when she didn't hear from him for several weeks after the surrender.

Like many vets, he came home and immediately went to college on the G. I. Bill, and the stories he tells about his undergraduate days at West Virginia University are among my very favorites. He lived in the old Episcopal parish house, Trinity Hall. The building had actually been condemned, but was allowed to remain open for a few more years due to the housing shortage when the student population swelled with returning troops eager to get on with their lives.

The Trinity Hall group was a motley bunch--most were first-generation college students, sons of miners and laborers from a huge variety of ethnic backgrounds. Smart, ambitious, and happy the war was over, they studied hard and played harder, each trying to outdo the other with practical jokes.

(My personal favorite has to do with one resident who was notorious for coming home drunk and waking everyone else up. Fed up, the other guys moved all of his furniture out to the front lawn after he left the house one night, recreating the guy's room down to running an extension cord out to plug in the guy's table lamp. The drunk had the last laugh, though: when he came home, he simply climbed into the bed right there on the lawn and turned out the light.)

My father has often said that the men of that generation were anxious to put the war behind them, to get back to the plans they'd had beforehand. And it's true, he never talked much about his war experiences when I was growing up. Apparently, I asked him once (I don't remember this) whether he'd ever seen a dead person.

He didn't answer me then. But in the last fifteen years or so, he's been talking a lot more about those years of his life, both during the war and after. And he's been to several reunions of both his Army Division and of the Trinity Hall guys, who managed to track each other down recently.

In fact, the photo below was taken at his Division's last reunion in 2007, when they met in Washington, D. C. and were joined by members of the current Division. One of the current officers had seen the V-E Day photo above previously, and had brought along a copy of Stars and Stripes he'd found so that Dad could recreate the pose.

And he and my mother were down here in Morgantown the first week of October for another get-together with some of the Trinity Hall folks. Dad grumbled that they'd run out of things to say to each other, and that he didn't think they needed to keep meeting. But he still clearly enjoyed himself, and enjoyed recounting more stories of his days at WVU.

On the Friday night of their visit, Tom and Dad and I sat around visiting for awhile after mom went to bed. Suddenly, the fingers on Dad's left hand started trembling; a few seconds later, his whole hand was wagging back and forth, and then his left arm.

We all studiously tried to ignore it (that's the Hathaway way, I'm afraid), but in less than a minute Dad jumped up and said he was going to bed, too. I felt awful: was this something that I didn't know about, but that he'd been dealing with for awhile?

When it happened again the next night, I discovered that, in fact, the previous night's episode had been the first. And, in fact, he jumped up because he was so freaked out by it: "It's WEIRD!" he exclaimed.

Long story short: after a bunch of tests, he's been diagnosed with metastatic brain cancer, and had surgery last Thursday to remove the tumor.

Once a warrior, always a warrior: as soon as he woke up, Dad was cracking jokes and expressing his impatience with his slow recovery. He wanted to report to me immediately that his anesthesiologist was a graduate of WVU's med school. I learned from my mother yesterday that Dad discovered that one of the doctors who comes in to check on him is also fluent in Italian, so they've been chatting away in Italiano.

In many ways, his memories of his war and college years seem to be the ones that are sustaining him through all of this. We've heard a lot about those days on our visits to the hospital.

Funny how the things you try to get away from, put behind you, are the very ones that stick with you. And now, as in 1945, he just wants to get on with his life.

Rufus' story

One nice thing about small academic conferences is that they can meet in more out-of-the-way places...and the American Folklore Society has met, in the past, in wonderful small cities like Lafayette, Louisiana and Eugene, Oregon--and this year, in Boise, Idaho.

It's been over two years since I was west of...well, Chicago, since moving away from Colorado in the summer of 2007. There are many things I've missed since, mainly low humidity and good Mexican food. Boise delivered both, and then some.

The day before the conference officially began, I went on a day-long tour that took us to a Boise synagogue built in 1895 whose grounds are now host to a community garden used mostly by Somali Bantu emigres. Later we met and saw the beautiful work of two talented women who make stirrups, saddles, and rawhide riding accessories. After a great lunch of chile rellenos at Lalo's in Caldwell, ID, we made our final stop at a horse-training facility run by a crusty old guy who grew up, of all places, in Huntington, West Virginia.

(I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't make a note of and can't recall the trainer's name, but you'll see him in the video at the end.)

En route to the horse-training center, Deana Attebery, the master saddlemaker/rawhide braider (pictured above), got on the tour bus's PA system to explain that she herself was a student at the barn we were going to visit, and that the trainer would be riding a horse that used to belong to her son.

During her earlier demonstration, Deana had mentioned that her son, whom she'd been teaching to make saddles, had died several years ago, though she didn't explain how. During lunch, we sat together, and though she mentioned "the horse incident" a couple of times, I didn't press her for details.

Over the PA, she told us the harrowing tale. Her son, who was in his 20s and a lifelong rider, had been thrown from his horse, Rufus, and--as Deana said--"they both ended up in the river." The horse survived; her son didn't.


However, the horse only survived in body; Rufus was distraught and crazy-angry after the accident, a totally different horse than he'd been beforehand. No one could ride him; he bucked constantly when he was in his stall, and he was aggressive with Deana and her family.

I can only imagine how agonizing this must have been for Deana: Rufus was the only witness to her son's death, the only one who could explain what had spooked him and caused him to throw his passenger. The incident clearly haunted Rufus as much as it haunted Deana, but they couldn't talk about it. And they couldn't work through it. Eventually, Deana gave him to the horse trainer we were headed to see.

As Deana explained, under the trainer's care, Rufus was completely transformed. He went from being a manic, uncontrollable basket case to being the trainer's primary horse, the one he uses to train other reining horses. This is western-style riding we're talking about, so if you know rodeo, you'll understand what the trainer meant when he said that Rufus would make a good pickup horse--one that wouldn't be afraid to sidle up to a bucking bronc and have its rider jump on his back. That takes an exceptionally calm and "supple" horse, to use the trainer's term.

Check out Rufus now. That's an amazing horse. He could probably give us humans some training, too: how to overcome trauma, let go of guilt, and get a new lease on life.